4/17/2016

Cagnacci, Guido - Frick Collection New York

GUIDO CAGNACCI'S MASTERPIECE

Guido Cagnacci is among the most eccentric painters who worked in seventeenth-century Italy. His works, mostly religious in subject, are known for their unashamed, often unsettling, eroticism. Even though his pictorial style was influenced by some of the greatest Italian baroque painters—the Carracci, Guercino, and Guido Reni—his figurative language always remained individual and highly recognizable. The unconventionality of his work led to his being almost entirely forgotten during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After exhibitions in Rimini and Bologna in 1952 and 1959, respectively, >> Guido Cagnacci* 1601Santarcangelo di Romagna † 1663Wienwas rediscovered by Italian art historians and writers, but he still remains unjustifiably little known outside of Italy. Cagnacci’s ambitious Repentant Magdalene, a large canvas acquired in 1982 by the Norton Simon Art Foundation in Pasadena, CA, is considered a masterpiece of seventeenth-century Italian art. For the first time since its acquisition almost thirty-five years ago, the painting will be on loan, traveling from the Norton Simon Museum to New York’s Frick Collection this fall (25.10.2016 - 22.01.2017). (Text: Frick Collection)